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Fun fact: you’ll spend, on average, six years of your life dreaming. From the age of 3 or 4 (before that your dreams didn’t include you), you’ve been playing out adventures, stressful days, embarrassing moments, horrendous fears, and awkward naked scenes (seriously, Phil, how hard is it to remember to wear pants to the office?). You may not always remember your dreams, but they’re a significant part of your life.

So that begs a question: do you regularly share this significant part of your life with your significant other?

Clara and I make it a practice to tell each other our dreams any time we remember something from them. It can be in great detail, or it can be just a sense or feeling. Whatever we remember.

Last night, we both woke up about the same time, and I said, “I just had a very satisfying dream. I was a substitute teacher, and I saw a popular girl be mean to an unpopular girl. After class, in front of both of them, I called the popular girl a *$&#!” I paused, vaguely remembering my own lack of popularity and the feels from all my generation’s teen movies. “It felt good seeing the unpopular girl smile, seemingly validated.”

While I enjoy sharing with Clara, I adore hearing her dreams.

It’s a silly thing sometimes. One of Clara’s dreams involved a bowl of soup gaining mass and sentience, becoming an unstoppable monster wreaking carnage all across the city, until a pack of hungry house pets came and licked it all up.

It’s a sexy thing sometimes. Once she dreamed we were in a warehouse of mattresses, and we made full use of the space. I mean, what better way to find the best mattress, right?

It’s a tough thing sometimes. Frequently, in some form or another, I cheat on Clara in her dreams. By our count, for every four sex dreams of me, there’s one of my infidelity.

I hate that my past choices have ignited a fear in her that haunts her nights. But I cherish the fact that she tells me.

The intimacy of sharing our inner mind, when we’re not even in control of our thoughts (unless you’re a lucid dreamer like I often am), is profound. It takes a lot of vulnerability for Clara to tell me her nightmare of our daughter getting violated. The primal mind — the lizard brain — is full of thoughts and feelings that we often push down, forcing our sleeping mind to process through them. Sometimes, this is the only way I can see that part of Clara’s mind.

And I married all of her. This is just a good way to partake in all of her.

Originally posted 2017-09-11 08:00:00.